


preying on you tonight

by clarkeneedsbellamy



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2018-03-08 04:18:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3195038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clarkeneedsbellamy/pseuds/clarkeneedsbellamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raven does her best not to unravel.  Murphy watches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	preying on you tonight

_A radio._

Stray dark hairs spill around her eyes.  Raven shoves the heel of her palm to her face, smudging them away along with the salt water scratching her skin red and blotched.

 _She’s supposed to work on a fucking_ radio _._

Her foot – the one that still works, the one that still feels – lashes out hard against the ground, kicking dirt into the air and an ache against her toes.  She heaves a breath.  She repeats.  She’s shoving her own guts piecemeal back into her body, threading the wound with spasming heartbeats and boiling blood, and Clarke wants her to work on a  _radio._

(And she gets that, she does, hurry up and save the world or whatever.  Normally she’d be jumping straight on board, but normally Clarke’s hands wouldn’t be soaked with Finn’s blood.)

 _Finn._ She swallows the name along with a new crop of wails.

“Need a hand?”  Raven’s teeth grind hard together.  No. Fucking. Way.  She’s not dealing with this, can’t deal with this, right now. She shouldn’t have to fucking deal with anything right now, let alone him. “Or,” Murphy’s voice balances on the edge of a blade and a taunt, “a leg?”

“Screw you.”

He’s leaning on the edge of a tent, right in her way, and  _it should have been you_ is on the curve of her tongue.  She swallows that too.  It should have been.  It wasn’t.  Hell if she’s going to give him the satisfaction of pointing that out.

A worm of a smirk coiling across his mouth, he kicks himself from his recline and a slosh into his canteen.  “You look like you could use a drink.”

She looks at the rim his lips had just closed around.  She raises an eyebrow (barely a tremble touches it; she counts it as a victory).  “I would rather drink lighter fluid.”

“I wasn’t offering.”  Another shot.  “See, this is a celebratory drink, and you just don’t seem to be in a celebratory mood.”

Raven doesn’t register her fists curling white at her sides, doesn’t care that her nails are grinding crescent moons against her palms, so long as she doesn’t lose control of her tear ducts.  Not in front of him.  Anger, taut and burning through her words like a flame at a match, does a decent enough job of drying them.  “You’re  _celebrating_.”  It’s not a question.  He doesn’t deserve her surprise.

Wiping his mouth dry, Murphy shrugs a pretense of indifference and a jerked look towards Finn’s –  _Finn’s, Finn, her Finn, her best friend, all she has,_ Finn’s – body.  “It was almost me over there.”

His mouth curls.  He walks away.  She mangles her tongue tooth-scalloped to keep from yelling after him.

* * *

Her fists jitter against her leg, just by the edge of her brace.  She can’t feel it.  Not when her hands pound, not when they whisper; hell, not if she took a blade and started carving. 

She didn’t – contrary to what Clarke,  _fucking Clarke_ , might think – try to kill the Grounder’s commander, but fuck if she wouldn’t have enjoyed watching the bitch die.  Her teeth drag trenches against her lip.  She deserves it.  They all do.  And judge her, fine, but don’t call her guilty for admitting it.

The rustle of her tent flap nettles a sigh between her cinched lips – Clarke, probably, come to accuse her or apologize, for all the difference it will make. 

(None. It will make no difference. It won’t matter until she can look at her without seeing a knife in her hand, her palms slick with Finn’s blood, and the eerie emptiness etched across her features as she goes through the motions of everything after.  Clarke let Finn die.  She doesn’t deserve anyone’s coddling, let alone hers.) 

“Look who’s the murderer now.”  But the drawl doesn’t belong to Clarke’s carefully enunciated, flimsily constructed calm. Raven’s eyelids grind themselves shriveled. “Well, attempted murderer.”

“Go away, Murphy.”  She doesn’t need to look up to identify the voice, the sneering weasel behind it.  He lowers himself beside her, straight into her periphery regardless.  Periphery enough, at least, to see the arch of his eyebrow.

“Murderers don’t really get to pick and choose for company.”

She rolls her eyes.  Another sob story. She’s not bleeding on the ground now; she doesn’t have to listen.  “ _Psychos_ don’t get to pick and choose.  Leave.”

He ignores her.  “But then, maybe the princess will stop fighting for your life out there, and you’ll end up hanged and happy with your boy again. Post-mortem sweethearts.”  A smirk hiccups across his face.  “Well, until someone offs Clarke.  Who knows who Spacewalker will pick then—”

Her hands are curled and clawing at his face before he finishes the breath, before she finishes hers.  She wreaks the tears that she won’t cry against his cheek, nail by jagged nail.  “Maybe you poisoned the commander,” Raven snarls. (Because blame is easy, blame is constant, blame is all she has left without Finn.)

He barely flinches at the assault.  Tracing his fingertips against the white shadows of her fingernails, he cants his head.  “Now, why would I want her dead?”

“You need a reason now?”

“Not really, no.  Not when you, her second, and every single person here all have so many.”

She forgets, for a moment, to glare at him.  “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Think about it.”

Her glare shudders back, belated and boiling.  “Screw you.”

Murphy rolls his eyes. Chin turned pointedly away, she wouldn’t notice him rising to his feet if not for the shuffle of his boots.  “I’d tell you ‘good luck’ but…” he could be sneering, he could be smirking, she doesn’t care enough to look.  “Somehow, I don’t think you’d appreciate it.”

She doesn’t tell him to leave again.  He does anyway.

* * *

Raven doesn’t look at Murphy when they string her up.  Not at Clarke, not at Bellamy, not at Abby, not at anyone.  It’s enough that she can feel them all looking at her.

Nor does she doesn’t look at him when, two sore arms and who knows how much time later, Clarke rushes to untie her, and Lexa turns on Indra.   _You, her second, and…_   It’s only when she jerks away from Clarke’s careful grip that her eyes meet his for a flickered beat.  He flashes her a mockery of a grin. 

“You knew,” she seethes at him mid-faulty step. “You knew and you didn’t say a thing.”

Bitterness, cold and sharp, folds at the corners of his mouth.  “I recall quite a few words.”

“ _To me,_ you asshole.  You—“

“Left you to die?”  He raises an eyebrow at her bared teeth.  “Go figure.”

He walks away.  She wishes she scratched his face a bit deeper, a bit more.  She wishes she hit him.  She wishes she shot him.  (A pang shoots hard through her good leg instead.)  Damn it, she wishes could run after him.

* * *

Bellamy and Lincoln leave.  Octavia grinds her teeth and bears her way through it.  Clarke goes pale as a ghost, pale as Finn’s ghost, staring and staring at things that don’t merit staring at.   

Raven just wants to hit something.  She should be with them.  She should be at Mount Weather, making those bastards pay, making them bleed, making them hurt.  They left her to die.  They left her to die, took everyone else, and left Finn to chase after them.  Her palm lashes out against the plain of her worktable.  They left Finn to chase after Clarke, left Finn to come to that damn village, left him to  _die._    

So Bellamy damn well better burn them to ashes.

She dangles a flask of water between her fingers, wishing for liquor to burn her throat barren of fetus sobs and almost-screams.  Wishing that Wick hadn’t just walked over to her slumped form. 

"You do realize the table never did anything to you.”

Palm still muttering an ache, she flexes her fingers against its rim. Her eyes skirt across her braced leg, dripping like molasses and snapping like a slingshot.  Her hand hurts. Fine.  At least she can feel it.  “What do you want?”

Wick levels a stare at her.  “I work here too, you know.”

And she wouldn’t mind that, not really, if he wasn’t so damn nice. Ignoring Clarke is easy – not fair, maybe, but Raven’s never claimed to be that. Ignoring Wick, lashing out at Wick…  She might as well kick a golden retriever in the stomach; he’ll only keep trying to make things better.

So she says that she’s leaving.  So she barely mumbles a  _thank you_ when he pauses, thinks, and finally hands her a flask of something a hell of a lot stronger than water.

So she carves a space for herself alone, away from Clarke’s guilt and Wick’s conversation, and drinks.

* * *

 

And drinks.

* * *

And drinks.

* * *

She keeps drinking until she has to grope and strain to find another drop of drink.  From there – Raven doesn’t know how she ends up on her feet.  She doesn’t know how she ends up walking, or where she’s walking to, until she’s hunched over, and hating, hating,  _hating_ her useless, dead leg.

“Having trouble?”

She’s glad it’s Murphy who asks.  It doesn’t matter if she ignores him, curses him, hurts him.  He  _shot_ her.  He did this to her.  He freaking deserves it.

"Because of you,” she grits out between pained breaths.

The bastard smirks at her.  “I forced you to drink your weight in moonshine?”

She wants to slice the curl from his lips, carve them into a perpetual blank scowl.  She wants to mar him, mangle him, cripple him like he crippled her.

“You’re the reason Finn is dead,” she slurs, mind too blurry and blotched to care that she didn’t want to say any of this to him.  This is pain, raw and searing her voice.  This is weakness.  This is  _nothing_ that he should get to see.  (And maybe she’ll care about some of that, come morning.)

A muscle ticks in his jaw, smirk finally slipping.  “I tried to stop him.  It’s not my fault your boyfriend lost it.”

Her arm batters its weight towards her braced leg.  “You did this to me,” she says, sloppy, seething, and more coherent than she’s felt in weeks.  “I would have been with him.  If my damn leg weren’t—” She glares a nest of tears vacant from her eyes.  “I should have been with him.”

She doesn’t buck and battle as hard as she should – as hard as she could – when he grapples a hand against her arm to herd her towards her tent. 

He doesn’t blink when she murmurs mid-fall towards her pillow, “I hate you.”  The water he’d forced to her mouth drips from her lips with the words.

Murphy’s chuckle could break glass.  “I know.”

Maybe that’s why she lifts herself slowly from her bed. That’s damn well the only reason why her hands suddenly sift at her shirt’s hem, wrangling its fabric wrinkled and her torso bare. 

He hates her.  She hates him.  None of this will matter. 

Before he jerks his gaze away, she catches him staring at her hips, her waist, her chest. (And she should loathe that, would usually, can’t imagine why she doesn’t now.) 

“You don’t want to do this.”

“You do,” Raven speaks with a certainty she’s never considered in reference to him.  She’s hot.  She knows that.  Might as well assume Murphy has noticed too. 

A gulp pulses down his throat.  He leans close to her ear, close enough that his breath warms a stain against her skin, and – “I don’t screw drunks, Reyes.”

“Why not?” she can’t quite bring herself to trace her lips along his jaw, to clutch his shoulders, to touch him first. “I couldn’t hate you more than I already do.”

Her earlobe can feel the tilt of his head, the weight of his mind turning that over. 

“If it were up to me,” she continues, “you’d be dead right now.”  She flexes slightly, the aftertaste of water conspiring with a cold breeze to straighten her spine. “You don’t owe me anything.”

She feels the stillness of his face.  She feels his nod too, reads his surrender in the smile that spreads slowly across her mouth. 

He kisses her first. 

(In the back of her mind, she remembers to tally the victory.)

* * *

Finn was soft.  He touched her like she was one of his wire jewelry creations, as if his every touch of her skin mattered, as if she were everything. Which she was to him, which he was to her, once.

Bellamy used her.  She didn’t mind that, granted, since she was using him.  She used him to forget, used him to retaliate, and didn’t care what he used her for in turn.

Murphy hates her with his every touch, and that’s just fine by her.  She loathes him right back with every claw of her nails against his shoulders, every grind of his teeth against her chest.  Every groan he makes coils triumph through her stomach.  Every moan she wreaks slinks like a defeat from her throat. 

His fingertips curl hard around her hips, hard enough to hurt, hard enough to bruise.  He doesn’t hold her like she’s everything, not like she’s anyone; Murphy holds her like he wants to bruise himself into her flesh.

She pulls at his hair, tangling her fingers into its darkness and grease, pushing his mouth down lower and lower until his teeth are clenching around her thighs. 

His tongue goes higher.

Her fingers dig deeper. 

Raven bites her tongue numb to keep from screaming.  She could strangle him for chuckling when she doesn’t quite manage.

* * *

 

“That,” she growls mid-toss of her cheek against her pillow, “was a one time thing.”

“Sure.”  His smirk, knife-carved and blade-sharp, slices her sleep into tatters.

* * *

She mumbles ‘fuck you’ against the same smirk a few nights later. 

“Isn’t that,” he curls the syllables onto her tongue, “the point?”

And, as replies go, that’s so fucking cliché, so predictable, that she can’t help but grin her mouth harder against his.


End file.
